moonlight miles
by irnan
Summary: The dragon has three heads, they say: but direwolves hunt in packs. AU.
1. be lying by your side

_this is a disclaimer._

_**AN:** five-things ficlets; part of the watch!verse._

Start with Robb: wolf-khal of Winterfell who tries and tries and keeps on trying even when there's nothing left for him to try for.

1) He remembers being dead. He remembers, and it terrifies him.

2) One way to fight back against that memory: one defiance, final, total, ever-ongoing. He lives. He lives and loves and makes his own mark on the world, and when they seat him in the crypts with a direwolf at his feet and a sword across his knees, that mark will remain: in his daughter's life, in her children's, in the Kingdom he has carved for himself out of birthright and blood, in the histories of the Maesters and the stories of his people.

3) Only Jeyne. Only ever Jeyne. (He looked into the face of an enemy and saw there compassion; and though he shattered at her feet (in her arms), she never changed.)

4) He is not Doran Martell, to sit idly by while they cut his sister's husband down, to watch when they drag her from her room and dash her daughter's head against a wall, to plot and scheme and wait for vengeance for his nephew. If ever he had to: Daenerys would die and Aegon with her and the Princess of Dragonstone would take the Iron Throne in her children's names with all the power of the North behind her.

5) Once he thought he would be his father over again to the best of his ability. Now he is thankful he was not.

* * *

><p>Jon: wolf-lord, dragon-prince, Rhaegar's child but Lyanna's son.<p>

1) Part of him always believes that Rhaegar was mad: less violent but as perfectly insane as Aerys himself.

2) Part of him is always afraid that one day he too will prove no different. (They say the Prince of Summerhall never grows angry because he has icewater for blood. The truth is he never grows angry because he is afraid it's wildfire instead.)

3) Daenerys is his life. Robb is his King.

4) He dreams of snow and sunlight on ice and running the wolfswood under a hunter's moon, and thinks perhaps his mother dreamt the same in the months before his birth.

5) Always, always might-have-beens that shadow his footsteps. Lies told by one uncle and told to another; Maester Aemon might have healed Aegon's wounds the way he taught Jon to heal his.

* * *

><p>Sansa: Blodeuwedd, the woman made from flowers forced into the shape of an owl; but Sansa's other shape is a wolf, and she does not resist it.<p>

1) Anything but be that little bird: she-wolf, shadow-queen, poisoner, murderess, sellsword's whore, liar, politician. Anything but helplessness.

2) She does two things expertly, above all others. Change, and learn.

3) Arya, Robb, Jon all see past the first. Bran and Rickon never truly know more than the second. She is to them Catelyn come back; to the older ones, she is herself completely.

4) Aegon fits into her life like a missing puzzle-piece. _Here I'll show you. I'll fit you. I'll match you step for step and turn for turn, one-two-three to the rhythm of your heartbeat_.

5) Only sometimes, she calls their children _Starks_, and they'll look at her and smile.

* * *

><p>Arya: assassin, schemer, sometimes-general, lost wolf-pup in the wilderness who found her way home; Robb's conscience as he is hers.<p>

1) Wargs too much and goes too far, safe in the knowledge that Bran will always fetch her back.

2) Forgets, sometimes still, her name. Robb's Sister, Kitten's Aunt, Eddard's Daughter: these things bring her back.

3) Barely four-and-ten when she slew Ramsey Bolton in his bed and presided over the sack of the Dreadfort and the burning of the castle and Robb would not have given it to her if she'd not told him _i was there and i couldn't reach you –_

4) Won't marry Jojen because it would mean not being _Arya Stark_ anymore. (That's how fragile her soul still is.)

5) Things shift between her and Jon: Robb understands her best as Sansa comes to know Jon, but somewhere underneath there's still Arya and Jon, romping in the godswood the way they did when they were children.

* * *

><p>Brandon: the winged wolf, blind yet keen-eyed enough to see the spells he weaves into the Wall as threads of sunlight in the darkness of the Long Night<p>

1) Tree-roots through the earth, life beneath his fingers shaping itself to his commands: that is the magic he carries within him. (The godsworn do not kill.)

2) Arya thinks he died, being given his legs back, being _changed_. Bran is afraid she's right. Mercy his gods know not: only life, life above all, life over death and light over darkness.

3) Only sometimes, if you please them, if you choose rightly, if you love hard enough for them to see, they give you what you asked for.

4) Winterfell he raised again by touch and memory: he stood at the heart of it and called out directions and his siblings orbit around him even now, Bran the peacemaker, the councillor, the Wise One: the North to whom all their compasses point.

5) Touching, he sees: layers upon layers past into present into future, spider webs of events that lead out of his knowledge. _This war is ended forever. It is far from over. All this will come again. While the Kings of Winter sit their thrones, (we) Winterfell will remain_.

* * *

><p>Rickon: the pup-who-never-was-a-pup, watchful Border Lord, dashing Battle Prince who's seen too much too soon<p>

1) His son will remember his face when he is a man. (In a way, that's all he wants for his children.)

2) Turning-point, luck-changed-that-moment, truth among the lies that led them back into the light (cold light, winter light, sun-on-snow light, wolf-light): the letter, and the words he read, and the meaning that followed a heartbeat later with Sansa's cup shattered on the floor. _Robb lives_.

3) Robb, who cried to see him; Robb, who died because he had; Robb, who wanted to give him back his childhood but couldn't, and so he gave him adulthood instead.

4) He tends to justice, not compassion, and to loves and hates as fierce and complete as his lord father's brother's, though he never knows it (they would have loved each other).

5) _Winter's End_ the words he and his wife will bequeath to their children: the Tower Starks of Moat Cailin will grow with a hope as their motto.

* * *

><p>Jeyne: southron maid turned Northmen's Queen, Winterfell's Lady (mother) with healing hands and springtime smile<p>

1) Gentle-hearted gentle-handed, who grew a core of steel and ice to keep her daughter safe and found she couldn't put it aside even when she no longer needed it.

2) Ran away from one set of kinsmen to cleave completely to another: if there's a vestige-memory-shred of fear left in her for Grey Wind (or Robb, Robb as he is now, the lengths he will go to the whispers that will follow him to keep them safe), no one ever sees it.

3) Only Robb. Only ever Robb. When he was dead she dreamed him up most every night and heard his voice in her ear; thought he would haunt her for there was no iron longsword laid across his knees nor ever would be, and welcomed it. (He is given back to her, never a ghost at all, but that it was her own voice all along she never considers.)

4) She has no taste for travel; she walked too far while pregnant. Winterfell sits at the heart of the North, and the Queen is at the heart of Winterfell.

5) Robb builds her no septs. She worships quietly, at the heart tree, and thanks those gods who listen when their people speak.


	2. on down the road

_this is a disclaimer._

_**AN:** Random bits of (three generations of) Stark-ishness; part of the watch!verse. Slight spoilers for statements made about Brandon Stark the elder in ADWD._

1) When he goes to his father on his sixteenth name-day to ask for permission to marry Rys, the Old Man laughs in his face. (After that the wolf-blood just gets worse and worse.)

2) His sister watches his face hardenchangeclosedown and knows she won't ever let that happen to her.

3) Ned loves Robert because, at eight, he thinks he's found another Brandon, some other version of his brother sent with him into exile. He's past thirty before he admits to himself that eight-year-old was a fool.

4) He never tells Cat that both the men she's been promised to spent their betrothals to her in love with someone else.

5) Ned begins the journey home from Dorne wanting to throw up every time Aemon cries. _Your mother's with you, little one - over there, in the casket._

6) Then he gets used to it, and that is worse.

7) She spends the first year hurting and trying not to show it: hurt pride, lost hopes, lost siblings, distant home. Then slowly she sees that her hopes are not that lost at all.

8) Ashara's face would have left his memory more quickly had there not been those two babes that bound them together: one silver-haired, one dark.

9) Robb is Ned's son, as Arya is his daughter; but Sansa and Rickon and Bran are all Cat's (and perhaps she thinks, in some hidden corner of her mind, that he'll grow up to look like his namesake).

10) Ned never lets her see his grief. (Later she finds it was a lesson well-learned.)

11) Distantly he always knew his father was never quite the same after his sisters wed and went south with their husbands. _Wolves need packs,_ he'd say. _Remember that, Rickard. Wolves need packs_.

12) He works hard to give his children one: a strong pack, a large one, a pack that will rally to them and defend them, whether North or South. Being an only child himself he never quite understands how little they truly need it.

13) When Arryn calls him _Lord Stark_ Ned rages: rages for the first and last time in his life, rages and cries and blames himself. And then the old familiar control comes back, frozen in place and hard as ice. (Arryn is never sure he recognises the boy again.)

14) Robb doesn't like to let his daughters out of his sight for long when they're small - one memorable council of war saw him shouting down the Greatjon with a knife in one hand and Lynna held tight in the crook of his other arm. By the time the twins are born that fear has subsided - somewhat.

15) Arya has never been drunk. The only loss of control she permits herself is running with the wolves.

16) When they hunt together for the first time, all six of them together, it is winter: snow and moon and wind in the tree-tops. Mem is so much younger than the others that she scarce keeps up, but Sansa wakes next morning with tears on her cheeks and a fierce joy in her heart.

17) On Bran's sixteenth name-day, he gets Robb and Jon to scale the Wall with him. It is purest folly: he's blind, it's winter, a war is raging on the further side. Sansa rages when she learns of it. But that was much later, and the triumph came first.

18) Robert Baratheon hits her once. He's drunk and she won't fuck him, betrothal or no. She makes some furious, contemptuous remark about his wine cup war with Griff, and -

19) Her brothers think it was the Knight of the Laughing Tree who collected those particular bruises. But Rhaegar knows the truth; it was he who bathed and bound them for her.

20) Arya likes to climb the walls of Winterfell the way Bran used to once, as if someone should still do it now he can no longer. Robb thinks she walks the boundaries of the castle as if they were the boundaries of her very self, and asks no questions nor makes demands of her when she comes back down.

21) Rickon roams through training yards and kitchens with the same ease as courts and Queen's solars. There's a surplus of wolf blood in his veins, but he is Sansa's pupil too.

22) Jon and Robb both like to sit in the godswood when they can; Jon talks, sometimes, to his lady mother while he's there, or to his uncles. Robb sits in silence until the very quiet drives him out and back into his home, to his siblings and his children and his wife. _Not yet. Not just yet_. (So far, they have listened.)


End file.
